News and Events Vietnamese students who study abroad are vulnerable to fraud related to the theft of personal information, with the latest incident involving a junior at a Dutch university.
A Netherlands court recently agreed to delay the extradition of Vu Hoang Giang, a 24-year-old student at Saxion University in Deventer City, to the US until he completes his studies at the school on July 21, 2014, his lawyer Bart Stapert told Tuoi Tre last week.
“However, the student still faces imminent extradition, but I believe him innocent,” the lawyer said.
Giang has been accused of being an accomplice in a computer fraud (phishing) case of 800,000 euros (over US$1 million).
Vietnamese authorities and the student maintain that Giang’s ex-roommate, 26-year-old Nguyen Quoc Viet now living in Vietnam’s capital Hanoi, stole Giang’s personal particulars to commit the crime.
Many other students have fallen, or nearly fallen, victim to such fraudulence.
A student in Australia, Tran Trong Nghia, told Tuoi Tre that he had narrowly avoided facilitating the laundering of stolen money in 2009 when he was studying in Sydney.
One of Nghia’s friends in Vietnam asked him to mail an electronic item, priced at thousands of dollars, to the Southeast Asian country.
Nghia took a relative’s advice to check it when the item was sent to him and found that the electronic piece was bought under the name of an Australian couple residing in Tasmania State.
He called the couple who then confirmed that they had not ordered any such device using their credit card.
They figured out that their card information was leaked on a website so Nghia returned the item to the store where it had been purchased and secured a refund for the couple.
His friend in Vietnam denied any hacking into the couple’s bank account and has shunned Nghia ever since.
Abusing friendships to steal the information of credit or ATM cards is not uncommon among students in Australia, according to David B. Nguyen, a Vietnamese student in Sydney.
“My friends use many bank cards at the same time so even if their classmates or roommates have stolen one or two of them, they rarely realize that,” David said.
“Vietnamese students tend to be willing to share their personal information with their friends and even ask their acquaintances to fill in documents for making bank cards for them,” he added.
Students should not blindly trust their friends with regard to personal information if they do not want to get into unexpected trouble, Nguyen Van Hai, a master’s student in the Republic of Korea, advised.
| A Vietnamese man has been indicted in the District of New Hampshire for alleged participation in a ring to steal and sell the personal and financial data of more than 500,000 Americans, NBC News cited a US federal indictment as saying last week. Hieu Minh Ngo, 24, is now charged with 15 counts, including wire fraud, identity fraud, access device fraud and conspiracy charges, the newswire quoted the Justice Department as saying in a statement. Ngo was arrested in February 2013 while entering the United States, the statement said. Ngo and others purportedly stole and offered for sale over the Internet identity packages, including a person’s name, date of birth, social security number, bank account number and bank routing number, between 2007 and 2012, according to the indictment. They also face accusations of stealing and selling/transferring payment card data, the document said. The counts carry penalties ranging from two to twenty years in prison. |
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